Xiaotian Li, Di Liu, and Siyan Xie

Xiaotian Li is a curator, artist, writer and researcher based in Guangzhou and Yangjiang. She joined Huangbian Station Contemporary Art Research Center (HB Station) as a researcher in 2012, worked at CANTONBON and Video Bureau from 2014 to 2016, and worked as a curator at HB Station from 2016 to 2021. Recently she was one of the curators of the following exhibitions: ’Tsk-Tsk In The Streets’ at Times Museum in 2021, an exhibition on artistic practices and self-organisation in and around Yangjiang from the 1990s to the beginning of the millennium; ‘Empowerment’ at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany in 2022, which offers a global overview of art and feminisms of the twenty-first century with around 100 artistic positions from fifty countries; and a series of exhibitions between the collective and art space Synnika in Frankfurt and art spaces in Guangzhou, funded by the Goethe Institute. Li’s research and curatorial work is primarily motivated by care and curiosity.

Di Liu is an art historian based in Hong Kong and Cambridge, UK. Her research interests and practices include connoisseurship, art criticism, and community-based projects. She worked in the research department of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong from 2017 to 2019, and since 2019 has co-founded the independent publishing project Reading Room, which is part of the Lumbung community developed at documenta fifteen. She is completing a PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. She has published in magazines and journals such as Artforum, ArtReview China, Spike Art Magazine, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, as well as publications by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Asia Art Archive, Times Museum, and several anthologies on exhibition history and curating. She has been invited to present her research at international conferences held by Oxford University, Heidelberg University, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, among others. In July 2024, she convened and co-chaired the panel ‘Writings of/for Art in Transnational Contexts Contested Sites of Knowledge Production’ at the International Convention of Asia Scholars 13 in Surabaya, Indonesia.

Siyan Xie is a researcher, writer and practitioner whose work focuses on socially engaged art practices and the intersection of art, labour and gender in contemporary China. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where she researched the dynamics of socially engaged art communities in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Her dissertation, ‘Sensing in Common: Prefigurative Practices of Socially Engaged Art in China’, explores how the formation of socially engaged art communities/commons is based on three interrelated layers: economic, labour and relational. Siyan has also developed a strong foundation in teaching and curriculum development. She assisted in designing and delivering undergraduate courses in the Fine Arts Department of CUHK and led object-based research on Chinese antiquities at the CUHK Art Museum. Since 2021, Siyan has contributed to the Agora Learning Community, an innovative school in Shenzhen, where she developed courses to encourage students to engage with art history in an interactive, hands-on way, incorporating techniques such as woodcut printing and zine-making to explore feminist perspectives in art. Siyan’s writings have been published in Artforum China, Initium Media, The Paper, and BlackTeeth. Siyan currently splits her time between the U.S. and Chengdu, continuing her interdisciplinary research and creative practice.